Claim OwnershipUnpacking Latin America
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© Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University
Description
Unpacking Latin America is a monthly podcast hosted by Prof. Vicky Murillo on the exciting research produced by Columbia scholars about Latin American history, culture and politics, which helps our understanding of the contemporary challenges of the region. It is produced in English and selectively in Spanish.
17 Episodes
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Political Scientist Sarah Daly discusses the legacies of Latin American civil wars tracing them to the current levels of high criminality and voters’ preference for security even at the expenses of civil liberties. She discusses the impact of violence in Colombia, including this year presidential election, and the power concentration by President Bukele in El Salvador as examples of these processes.
Lawyer and philosopher Silvio Almeida discusses structural racism in Brazil in comparison with the US emphasizing the role of social movements in mobilization and production of knowledge within racialized state institutions, such as the judiciary, the legislature, and the police.
Historian Caterina Pizzigoni discusses the story of the Conquest for the indigenous people of Latin America. The demographic catastrophe it unleashed was followed by the continuity of everyday life in villages of sedentary populations. This contrasts with great disruption for those who were not peasants or lived in areas with gold and silver. She explains the rights and duties assigned by the Crown to indigenous peoples, as well as their resistance to the imposition of new gender roles and their adaptation of religion. She ends with the new challenges created by Independence on the indigenous populations of the region.
In this episode Marcelo Medeiros discusses conditional cash transfer programs addressing the role of conditionality on their political support and their positive effects on reducing poverty. He also elaborates on the limits of their technocratic design around 3 areas: First, he emphasizes how their fiscal conservatism made them shrink in the face of negative shocks that increased their need. Second, he points on the insufficiency of technocratic support and technical evaluations to avoid the dismantling of the largest regional conditional cash transfer programs by presidents Bolsonaro in Brazil and Lopez Obrador in Mexico. Finally, he discusses how the bureaucratic infrastructure created to target chronic poverty was inadequate to address the impact of shocks on a population that moved temporarily into poverty.
In this episode, Mauricio Cardenas discusses the impact of climate change and policies to reduce emissions in Latin America, based on his recent book on Climate Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean. He discussed the costs of climate change to countries in the region as well as the lessons on areas where different countries have move forward. He points to different opportunities, such as the electricity sector, as well as challenges, such as weak state capacity to monitor regulatory goals, especially in the agricultural frontier, and the need to compensate consumers who would pay higher costs for the energy transition. He concludes with a discussion of US incentives to collaborate with the region regarding climate change.
Nicholas Limerick discusses in this episode the dramatic effects of lack of schooling in Latin America during the pandemic as well as the role of indigenous organizations, especially CONAIE, in providing information in indigenous languages to fight Covid-19. He emphasizes how indigenous organization was crucial for the establishment of bilingual education and the teaching of Kitchwa in Ecuador. He further discusses how the teaching of Kitchwa in Ecuador has involved its standardization in a way that is not necessarily recognized by those speaking the language at home. Finally, he discusses the role of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement in the presidential election of this year and his perspectives on the runoff election of April 11th.
Graciela Montaldo discusses the strength of the feminist movement in Argentina and its political impact on the legalization of abortion, emphasizing its cultural dimensions and the strength of its diversity and intersectionality. She reflects on gender domination as a crucial political construction and its cultural interpretations from a domestic understanding of gender violence, questioned by the feminist social movement #NiUnaMenos, as well as the constraints on female voice in the public space in the early 20th century.
Julissa Reynoso, chief of staff of the future First Lady Jill Biden, discusses here the impact of the Latino vote on the election and new directions for the new administration in Latin America. She emphasizes the diversity of the Latino vote and, on foreign policy, points to changes on immigration policies, the need to foster economic options for the population in the region, to tackle climate change, and to foster hemispheric cooperation.
Claudio Lomnitz discusses in this episode the plight of the more than 70,000 disappeared or missing people in Mexico and their search by family members. This search does not confront a strategic plan but a complicit and weak state, which contributes both willingly and unwillingly. He further talks about Mexico’s violence as a symptom of government incapacity and its links to the militarization of security, which has continued under the presidency of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
In this episode, Frances will draw connections between Puerto Rico and Latin America based on a common history of hierarchies and coloniality and will discuss how the Puerto Rican society both in the island and in the Diaspora learned to self-organize in response to catastrophes seeking to replace the absence of by the federal state. She will also discuss how the current discussion on race and ethnicity highlights the hierarchies embedded in the Latinx and Latin American population and will tell us how her search for answering the question of Puerto Rican coloniality brought her to a career that transcends disciplinary boundaries.
Jose Antonio Ocampo discussed the economic consequences of COVID19 in Latin America, the new epicenter of the pandemic. He described the dramatic effect of quarantine on employment and production, which are heightened by uncertainty on the future of trade and commodity prices. He also pointed to the emergence of new social policies reaching not only the poor, but also the vulnerable population as an important consequence. In his view, the pandemic will force Latin American countries to invest more on health and to seek improving their fiscal capacity with a more redistributive reach.
Dr. Silvia S. Martins talks about the different patterns of COVID19 spread across the countries of Latin America and the importance of timely responses in shaping its pace while emphasizing the challenges for the large vulnerable population of the region. Based on the experience of Brazil, she discusses the importance of faster and more coordinated health responses to the pandemic while highlighting the impact of unified as opposed to contradictory messages to the population. The density and inequality of NYC, which generate parallels to Latin American cities, presents challenges for the Latino population, which often lacks adequate medical insurance based on their migration status. She concludes drawing lessons from the NYC experience for the region as well as lessons from Latin America for the US.
Eduardo Moncada is the son of two parents that escape from violence in Latin America and immigrated to the US. That trajectory has marked his work including the study of violence with the risk and difficulties it implies and his choice for ethnographic methods to unearth data where it doesn’t exist. He discusses here his book on urban violence in Colombia as well as his recent work on extortion, a pervasive phenomenon emerging as a result of state weakness that deprives citizens of basic public security in Latin America. He talks about its linkages to migration North and to the emergence of vigilantism seeking justice where the state does not provide it. Finally, Eduardo describes how criminal groups in Latin America have diversified into legal activities and have become part of global commodity chains showing how their survival goes beyond weak state into a global commercial system that accommodates them.
Miguel Urquiola talks about the role of competition on educational outcomes in a region where education coverage is larger than expected for the income level of Latin American countries, but where performance, as measured by an international standardized test, is lower than expected using that same metric. In evaluating the experiences with competition and choice at different educational levels, based on data from Chile, Colombia, and the US, Urquiola highlights that education markets do not necessarily always work as expected. In areas where metrics are clearer, such as research, market competition can produce excellence as shown by top US universities. In areas where metrics are less clear, such as teaching, information is not sufficiently good to provide rewards for better performance. Instead, choice can result in sorting around other criteria producing the selection of options that are not necessarily related to the educational performance of schools and universities.
Nara Milanich talks about the shift from cultural to biological definitions of paternity thanks to DNA testing and how such testing could either be used to recover kids stolen by military dictatorships or to halt migration at the US-Mexico border. She also explains age-based violence suffered by migrant children in Central America. Family is a crucial lens to understand inequality, she says as she discusses how family law was used in nineteenth century Chile to preserve social hierarchies. Civil law forbade paternity searches, thereby creating kinless children who often ended being used as unpaid domestic labor. Milanich concludes speaking on the role of youth in contemporary Chilean protests and how this is tied to the impact of for-profit education, as part of the market-based model that is currently being questioned.
Daniel Alarcon talks about how growing in a Peruvian household in Birmingham (Alabama) shaped his work in radio journalism and his written pieces in both Spanish and English. We talk about doing radio in Spanish and writing novels in English as well as about the origins of Radio Ambulante. He described the type of stories he and his wife and co-producer wanted to tell and how it is easier to tell Latin American stories from a global city like New York than from a country in the region. We also chatted about recent New Yorker pieces he wrote about Peru including the happiness produced by Peru’s classification in the 2018 World Soccer Cup and the suicide of former president Alan Garcia in the midst of a corruption scandal and conclude discussing Peru’s current political crisis and the possibilities open by the call of legislative elections in January 2020.
Ana Maria Ochoa talks about ethnomusicology and the connection between nature, sounds, and humans in defining what is music. Ana Maria talked about how humanity and sound are defined contextually and she described how she worked with written archives of sounds from the colonial era in Colombia and how the way we ‘record’ sound shapes our listening. Additionally, we talked about her work with Colombian indigenous film makers and the inter-disciplinary collective she convened to work on politics, environmental justice and aesthetics at Columbia University.
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